September 15.
Treaty by Glenn Loughrey
“...shoot them all.”
Testimonies of the shooting of Indigenous people – women, men and children.
The Norwegian ethnologist, Carl Lumholtz (1851-1922), spent twelve months living on the Upper Herbert River (1882-83) and recorded what he often heard from squatters in the region, that: The only treatment proper for the blacks is to shoot them all'. Lumholtz noted that one squatter 'acted on this principle', whereby:
He shot all the men he discovered on his run, because they were cattle killers; the women, because they gave birth to cattle killers; and the children, because they would in time become cattle killers. [1]
Reports reached Brisbane from the north, and inland to Georgetown (1870) from a correspondent 'who admits that he has himself shot natives [and]...as he says, he is not particularly prejudiced in favour of the natives or very soft-hearted'. The Brisbane Courier noted that 'our people have not yet been educated to the recognition of the human rights of the original possessors of Australia'. Their correspondent's:
...indictment touches mainly the districts lying between Cairns and Georgetown, where, he says, the blacks are being decimated, and by Government servants, in the shape of black troopers and their masters, whose 'dispersion' of the Aboriginals in particular localities has simply come to mean their slaughter. He speaks of men being kept for the purpose of hunting and killing the Aborigines; he gives instances of their camps being surrounded and men, women and children massacred for killing cattle, when, through the white man's presence, they could no longer find game; and he tells in detail one story of the extermination of a camp simply because some blacks had been seen passing a mining station where nothing had been stolen for months. Roundly he charges the 'grass dukes' and their subordinates with 'murdering, abducting children for immoral purposes, and stock whipping defenceless girls, and he condemns' each Government that comes into power for winking at the slaughter of our black fellow subjects of the Queen as an easy way of getting rid of the native question? The Northern Miner asserts that this picture is not overdrawn, and that the atrocities mentioned have even been exceeded. It refers to squatters branding blacks, keeping harems of black gins, and finding their slaughtering record no bar to advancement to high office in the State. The black trooper system is, in the view of this paper legalised murder, which reckons the life of a bullock of more account that than that of a score of blackfellows. [2]
C Lumholtz, Among Cannibals, John Murray, London, 1889, p. 373.
Brisbane Courier, 15 September 1888.
Acknowledgment: Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence, pp. 138-139, 234, n.23, n.24.
____
Paakantji* – run like the wind
you know I’m going to prove you wrong
bit of courage and guts, hard work, determination
gotta protect our culture for the future generations.
wiimpatjas* run like the river
we keep our culture strong
got strength and respect flowing from my ancestors
on this land where we belong…
* paakantji/wiimatjas – blackfellas (p. 171)
Acknowledgment: The Wilcannia Mob: Intergeneration, “Our Country, Our Way” in Homeland Calling – Words from a new generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voices, p. 15.